I hmphed. "What do they think happened?"
"They're still not sure. Apparently, no one else was in the area, or could have been, et cetera. It's been suggested by the Russians, who had ten people there, that this could be first contact—you know, that aliens took the missing ones, and somehow disarranged Mary's thought processes, leaving her behind as a messenger that isn't working. Her brain scans are bizarre. I mean, it doesn't sound very likely…"
"No."
"But it's the only theory that explains everything they found there. Some of which they won't tell me about. So, we're doing what we can to get Mary's testimony, but as you can see, it's hard. She seems most comfortable drawing diagrams."
"Next time we'll start with that."
"Okay. Any other ideas?"
"No," I lied. "When can you bring her back again?"
As if because I was blind I couldn't tell I was being duped! I struck fist into palm angrily. Oh, they were making a mistake, all right. They didn't know how much the voice reveals. The voice's secret expressivity reveals so much!—the language really is not adequate to tell it; we need that mathematics of emotion… In the high school for the blind that I briefly attended for some of my classes, it often happened that a new teacher was instantly disliked, for some falseness in his or her voice, some quality of condescension or pity or self-congratulation that the teacher (and his or her superiors) thought completely concealed, if they knew of it at all. But it was entirely obvious to the students, because the voice (if what I have heard is true) is much more revealing than facial expressions; certainly it is less under our control. This is what makes most acting performances so unsatisfactory to me; the vocal qualities are so stylized, so removed from those of real life…
And here, I thought, I was witnessing a performance.
There is a moment in Olivier Messiaen's Visions de l'Amen when one piano is playing a progression of major chords, very traditionally harmonic, while on another piano high pairs of notes plonk down across the other's chords, ruining their harmony, crying out, Something's wrong! Something's wrong!
I sat at my desk and swayed side to side, living just such a moment. Something was wrong.
When I collected myself I called the department secretary, who had a view of the hall to the elevator. "Delphina, did Jeremy just leave?"
"Yes, Carlos. Do you want me to try and catch him?"
"No, I only need a book he left in his office. Can I borrow the master key and get it?"
"Okay."
I got the key, entered Jeremy's office, closed the door. One of the tiny pickups that James Gold had gotten for me fit right under the snap-in plug of the telephone cord. Then a microphone under the desk, behind a drawer. And out. (I have to be bold every day, you see, just to get by. But they didn't know that.)
Back in my office I closed and locked the door, and began to search. My office is big: two couches, several tall bookcases, my desk, a file cabinet, a coffee table…. When the partitions on the seventh floor of the Gelman Library were moved around to make more room, Delphina and George Hampton, who was chairman that year, had approached me nervously: "Carlos, you wouldn't mind an office with no windows, would you?"
I laughed. All of the full professors had offices on the outer perimeter of the floor, with windows.
"You see," George said, "since none of the windows in the building opens anyway, you won't be missing out on any breezes. And if you take this room in the inner core of the building, then we'll have enough space for a good faculty lounge."
"Fine," I said, not mentioning that I could see sunlight, distinguish light and dark. It made me angry that they hadn't remembered that, hadn't thought to ask. So I nicknamed my office "The Vault," and I had a lot of room, but no windows. The halls had no windows either, so I was really without sun, but I didn't complain.
Now I got down on hands and knees and continued searching, feeling like it was hopeless. But I found one, on the bottom of the couch. And there was another in the phone. Bugged. I left them in position and went home.
Home was a small top-floor apartment up near 21st and N streets, and I supposed it was bugged too. I turned up Stockhausen's Telemusik as loud as I could stand it, hoping to drive my listeners into a suicidal fugal state, or at least give them a headache. Then I slapped together a sandwich, downed it angrily.
I imagined I was captain of a naval sailing ship (like Horatio Hornblower), and that because of my sharp awareness of the wind I was the best captain afloat. They had had to evacuate the city and all the people I knew were aboard depending on me. But we were caught against a lee shore by two large ships of the line, and in the ensuing broadsides (roar of cannon, smell of gunpowder and blood, screams of wounded like shrieking seagulls), everyone I knew fell—chopped in half, speared by giant splinters, heads removed by cannonball, you name it. Then when they were all corpses on the sand-strewn splintered decking, I felt a final broadside discharge, every ball converging on me as if I were point 0 at the tip of a cone. Instant dissolution and death.
I came out of it feeling faintly disgusted with myself. But because it actively defends the ego by eradicating those who attack its self-esteem, Cutsforth calls this type of fantasy in the blind subject healthy. (At least in fourteen-year-olds.) So be it. Here's to health. Fuck all of you.
Geometry is a language, with a vocabulary and syntax as clear and precise as humans can make them. In many cases definitions of terms and operations are explicitly spelled out, to help achieve this clarity. For instance, one could say:
Let (parentheses) designate corollaries.
Let [brackets] designate causes.
Let {braces} designate…
But would it be true, in this other language of the heart?
Next afternoon I played beepball with my team. Sun hot on my face and arms, spring smell of pollen and wet grass. Ramon got six runs in the at-bat before mine (beepball is a sort of cricket/softball mix, played with softball equipment ["It proves you can play cricket blind" one Anglophobe {she was Irish} said to me once]), and when I got up I scratched out two and then struck out. Swinging too hard. I decided I liked outfield better. The beepball off in the distance, lofted up in a short arc, smack of bat, follow the ball up and up—out toward me!—drift in its direction, the rush of fear, glove before face as it approaches, stab for it, off after it as it rolls by—pick it up—Ramon's voice calling clearly, "Right here! Right here!"—and letting loose with a throw—really putting everything into it—and then, sometimes, hearing that beepball lance off into the distance and smack into Ramon's glove. It was great. Nothing like outfield.
And next inning I hit one hard, and that's great too. That feeling goes right up your arms and all through you.
Walking home I brooded over Max Carrados, blind detective, and over Horatio Hornblower, sighted naval captain. Over Thomas Gore, the blind senator from Oklahoma. As a boy his fantasy was to become a senator. He read the Congressional Record, joined the debate team, organized his whole life around the project. And he became senator. I knew that sort of fantasy as well as I knew the vengeful adolescent daydreams: All through my youth I dreamed of being a mathematician. And here I was. So one could do it. One could imagine doing something, and then do it.
But that meant that one had, by definition, imagined something possible. And one couldn't always say ahead of the attempt whether one had imagined the possible or the impossible. And even if one had imagined something possible, that didn't guarantee a successful execution of the plan.
The team we had played was called Helen Keller Jokes (there are some good ones, too [they come {of course} from Australia] but I won't go into that). It's sad that such an intelligent woman was so miseducated—not so much by Sullivan as by her whole era: all that treacly Victorian sentimentality poured into her: "The fishing villages of Cornwall are very picturesque, seen either from the beaches or the hilltops, with all their boats riding to their moorings or sailing about in the harbor. When the moon, large and serene, floats up t
he sky, leaving in the water a long track of brightness like a plow breaking up a soil of silver, I can only sigh my ecstasy"—come on, Helen. Now that is living in a world of texts.
But didn't I live most (all?) of my life in texts as least as unreal to me as moonlight on water was to Helen Keller? These n-dimensional manifolds… I suppose the basis for my abilities in them was the lived reality of haptic space, but still, it was many removes from my actual experience. And so was the situation I found myself confronted with now, Jeremy and Mary acting out some drama I did not comprehend… and so was my plan to deal with it. Verbalism… words versus reality.
I caressed my glove, refelt the knock of bat against beepball. Brooded over my plan.
The next time Jeremy brought Mary Unser by my office, I said very little. I got out my "visitor's supply" of paper and pencils and set her down at the coffee table. I brought over my models: subatomic particles breaking up in a spray of wire lines, like water out of a showerhead; strawlike Taylor sticks for model making; polyhedric blocks of every kind. And I sat down with the ridged sheets made from her earlier drawings, as well as the models I had attempted to make of them, and I started asking very limited questions. "What does this line mean? Does it go before or behind? Is this R or R prime? Have I got this right?"
And she would honk a sort of laugh, or say, "No, no, no, no" (no problem with sequencing there), and draw furiously. I took the pages as she finished them and put them in my Xerox, took out the ridged, bumpy sheets and had her guide my fingers over them. Even so they were difficult, and with a squeak of frustration she went to the straw models, clicking together triangles, parallels, etc. This was easier, but eventually she reached a limit here too. "Need drawing beyond," she said.
"Fine. Write down whatever you want."
She wrote and then read aloud to me, or I put it through the Xerox machine marked translation to Braille. And we forged on, with Jeremy looking over our shoulders the whole time.
And eventually we came very close to the edge of my work, following subatomic particles down into the microdimensions where they appeared to make their "jumps." I had proposed an n-dimensional topological manifold, where 1
So here I was "conversing" with a young woman who in ordinary conversations could not order her words correctly—who in this realm spoke with perfect coherence—who was in fact speaking about (inquiring about?) the edges of my own private work.
The kind of work that Jeremy Blasingame used to ask me about so curiously.
I sighed. We had been going on for two or three hours, and I sat back on the couch. My hand was taken up in Mary's, given a reassuring squeeze. I didn't know what to make of it. "I'm tired."
"I feel better," she said. "Easier to talk way—this way."
"Ah," I said. I took up the model of a positron hitting a "stationary" muon: a wire tree, trunk suddenly bursting into a mass of curling branches. So it was here: one set of events, a whole scattering of explanations. Still, the bulk of the particles shot out in a single general direction (the truths of haptic space).
She let go of my hand to make one last diagram. Then she Xeroxed it for me, and guided my hands over the ridged copy.
Once again it was Desargues' theorem.
At this point Mary said, "Mr. Blasingame, I need a drink of water." He went out to the hall water dispenser, and she quickly took my forefinger between her finger and thumb (pads flattening with an inappropriate pressure, until my finger ached)—squeezed twice, and jabbed my finger first onto her leg, then onto the diagram, tracing out one of the triangles. She repeated the movements, then poked my leg and traced out the other triangle. Then she traced down the line off to the side, the one generated by the projection of the two triangles, over and over. What did she mean?
Jeremy returned, and she let my hand go. Then in a while, after the amenities (hard handshake, quivering hand), Jeremy whisked her off.
When he returned, I said, "Jeremy, is there any chance I can talk to her alone? I think she's made nervous by your presence—the associations, you know. She really does have an interesting perspective on the n-dimensional manifold, but she gets confused when she stops and interacts with you. I'd just like to take her for a walk, you know—down by the canal, or the Tidal Basin, perhaps, and talk things over with her. It might get the results you want."
"I'll see what they say," Jeremy said in an expressionless voice.
That night I put on a pair of earplugs and played the tape of Jeremy's phone conversations. In one when the phone was picked up he said, "He wants to talk with her alone now."
"Fine," said a tenor voice. "She's prepared for that."
"This weekend?"
"If he agrees." Click.
I listen to music. I listen to twentieth-century composers the most, because many of them made their music out of the sounds of the world we live in now, the world of jets and sirens and industrial machinery, as well as bird song and woodblock and the human voice. Messiaen, Partch, Reich, Glass, Shapiro, Subotnik, Ligeti, Penderecki—these first explorers away from the orchestra and the classical tradition remain for me the voices of our age; they speak to me. In fact, they speak for me; in their dissonance and confusion and anger I hear myself being expressed. And so I listen to their difficult, complex music because I understand it, which gives me pleasure, and because while doing so I am participating fully, I am excelling, no one can bring more to the act than I. I am in control.
I listened to music.
You see, these n-dimensional manifolds… if we understand them well enough to manipulate them, to tap their energy… well, there is a tremendous amount of energy contained in those particles. That kind of energy means power, and power… draws the powerful. Or those seeking power, fighting for it. I began to feel the extent of the danger.
She was quiet as we walked across the Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial. I think she would have stopped me if I had spoken about anything important. But I knew enough to say nothing, and I think she guessed I knew she was bugged. I held the back of her upper arm loosely in my left hand and let her guide us. A sunny, windy day, with occasional clouds obscuring the sun for a minute or two. Down by the Mall's lake the slightly stagnant smell of wet algae tinged all the other scents: grass, dust, the double strand of charcoal and cooking meat… The sink of darkness swirling around the Vietnam Memorial. Pigeons cooed their weird, larger-than-life coos and flapped away noisily as we walked through their affairs. We sat on grass that had been recently cut, and I brushed a hand over the stiff blades.
A curious procedure, this conversation. No visuals, for me; and perhaps we were being watched, as well. (Such a common anxiety of the blind, the fear of being watched—and here it was true.) And we couldn't talk freely, even though at the same time we had to say something, to keep Blasingame and friends from thinking I was aware of anything wrong. "Nice day." "Yeah, I'd love to be out on the water on a day like this." "Really?" "Yeah."
And all the while, two fingers held one finger. My hands are my eyes, and always have been. Now they were as expressive as voice, as receptive as ever touch can be, and into haptic space we projected a conversation of rare urgency. Are you okay? I'm okay. Do you know what's going on? Not entirely, can't explain.
"Let's walk down to the paddle boats and go out on the basin, then."
I said, "Your speech is much better today."
She squeezed my hand thrice, hard. False information? "I… had… electroshock." Her voice
slid, slurred; it wasn't entirely under control.
"It seems to have helped."
"Yes. Sometimes."
"And the ordering of your mathematical thought?"
Buzzing laugh, hurdy-gurdy voice. "I don't know—more disarranged, perhaps—complementary procedure? You'll have to tell me."
"As a cosmologist did you work in this area?"
"The topology of the microdimensions apparently determines both gravity and the weak interaction, wouldn't you agree?"
"I couldn't say. I'm not much of a physicist."
Three squeezes again. "But you must have an idea or two about it?"
"Not really. You?"
"Perhaps… once. But it seems to me your work is directly concerned with it."
"Not that I know of."
Stalemate. Was that right? I was becoming more and more curious about this woman, whose signals to me were so mixed… Once again she seemed a bundling of darkness in the day, a whirlpool where all lightness disappeared, except for around her head. (I suppose I imagine all that I "see," I suppose they are always haptic visions.)
"Are you wearing dark clothes?"
"Not really. Red, beige…"
As we walked I held her arm more tightly. She was about my height. Her arm muscles were distinct, and her lats pushed out from her ribs. "You must swim."
"Weight lifting, I'm afraid. They made us on Luna."
"On Luna," I repeated.